Simulating Smart Healthcare Systems in the Edge-Cloud Continuum

The integration of Edge and Cloud computing into healthcare systems has revolutionized the way patient data is processed, stored, and analyzed, thus enabling continuous monitoring and real-time decision-making. However, unpredictable factors such as diverse network conditions, device heterogeneity, and workload dynamics significantly affect the system performance and limit the benefits for the final user, i.e., the patient. Fortunately, simulation proves to be an effective tool for assessing the functional and non-functional aspects of applications or systems prior to their actual deployment. This paper first presents a comprehensive simulation framework for smart healthcare systems operating in the EdgeCloud continuum, based on an extension of the well-known EdgeCloudSim tool. Then, through a simple yet effective use case of smart healthcare application, the paper show how the simulation-based design allows (i) to preliminarily evaluate the performance (latency, success ratio, etc.) of the service based on the characteristics of the infrastructure and of the system scale; (ii) to assess the impacts of specific communication protocols and offloading strategies; and (iii) to realize the most suitable application or platform configuration before the actual deployment.